


the woman who lived here too

by LucyRasmussen



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:08:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27438601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LucyRasmussen/pseuds/LucyRasmussen
Summary: She watches time unfold from her attic window.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	the woman who lived here too

**Author's Note:**

> I am probably very alone in this, but I was quite enthralled by the character of Perdita in A Certain Romance of Old Clothes. And I felt like telling her story. Someone should.
> 
> I don't own the show, nor the character.

She wasn't a good person in life.

She was envious and greedy and she was a murderer.

So she expected to end up in Hell. To be tortured or feel tortured in the fiery pits of Hell.

But that doesn't happen.

Dying didn't hurt, it was just one moment to the next.

Watching as her body is taken away and later, watching from afar as it it buried with her father and sister.

There is no horned creature holding her soul captive, just her sister walking and wailing on the stairs every night.

Perhaps the devil does manifest in beautiful things, something she's learned to her own disgrace.

  
*

The chest is eventually taken away.

She feels glad for it, as it is one less implement to pain her with.

From the window, she sees her sister wander across the lawn and into the house.

Hears her footsteps on the landing.

Walking past the portraits of who they once were.

*

The Manor changes inhabitants, over and over again.

Nobody ever really ventures into the attic, nobody needs to.

She enjoys watching the gardeners prune and shear and grow roses.

She'll appear to them, and sometimes one of them catches her in the corner of his eye.

They never come back after that happens.

*

Even in death, she is still envious.

That her sister gets to walk and cry and is not confined to just the one room.

*

One night, Viola steals a little boy.

He'd come up here, the first person to do so in years.

Adam, she thinks his name was.

He didn't question her presence, just handed her a tin soldier or a pencil and kept about his play.

She stole his body, and left his soul up here with her.

He runs around the house in the night, and sometimes she chides him to be quiet or come back soon.

*

Time passes, and she watches from her attic window as people stop arriving in carriages and instead in noisy machines they call cars.

She watches the ladies arrive in unseemly dresses, exposing their knees or chests.

*

Her features fade. Her voice fades.

Her name is still etched in the flagstone in the family chapel, but she supposes that's faded now too.

The little girl who now lives here has a majestic dollhouse, and Adam re arranges it every night while she sleeps.

*

One day, she manages to crack a window. 

Just a few inches, but enough to allow in a chill that someone complains about.

She knows because they send up the lady gardener to check it out.

She watches from the shadows as she closes it again and turns around and faces her.

Just square faces her.

"You happy now?"

With that, she leaves and for a little while, Perdita feels her features returning for a few minutes.

Feels remembered.

*

She doesn't like the valet. 

Not when he lives and not when Viola dumps his soul and takes his body.

He is an awful man and he refuses to accept that fate has already cast his dice.

The governess dies, and Perdita does not care for her either.

They squabble as though they were alive, over going to America.

Adam hides in her skirts when they do.

*

The new governess has a strange accent.

She gathers that she's from the Colonies, or what they say is America now.

*

The valet uses her as a ragdoll, a thing to set an example.

The governess screams and cries.

They overtake the children and all she can do is watch helplessly from her corner of the attic.

*

Things are changing, she can feel it.

Like shackles falling away.

She hears voices out by the lake, Adam sits in the corner and she lets him know that it's all right.

If they go, they go together.

The final shackle falls and she sees her father and her husband waiting for her.

Perhaps so much time has passed nobody remembers she doesn't deserve Heaven, but she follows them anyway.

The attic goes quiet and stays quiet.

After all, tin soldiers don't talk.


End file.
